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Thursday, 5 March 2009

Mortification corner

Because I love you, I am back, and because this is your one stop shop for inappropriate oversharing, I bring you this.

Due to the chronic stupidity epidemic that is raging unchecked through the Waffle household, I ran out of contraceptives last week. Since then, due to my previous searing experience with the ninety eight year old gynecologist who liked to showcase his hacking cough whilst in full speculum mode, if you get my drift, I have not managed to do anything about this. This man was a true horror, and left me legs akimbo for a full twenty minutes while he pottered around his office doing a little light tidying and peering down his microscope. Also, he seemed terribly keen on cauterising things that in my opinion have no place being cauterised. Brrr.

But of course, spring is in the air and the sap is rising, and solemn discussions must be punctuated somehow and even giant pandas get frisky every thousand years or so, and the inevitable happened. And because of my chequered history with things fertility related, this is not the kind of thing I can just ignore. Emergency contraception beckoned, yippee, am I a feckless thirteen year old? Apparently I am. At the fifth pharmacy I trudged past, there were no male assistants in their teens or twenties and no coven of elderly ladies with shopping trolleys eavesdropping. Just one lady pharmacist. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and went in.

It was very anti-climactic. I had expected to be led into a back room, grilled on my sexual exploits, lectured sombrely and possibly given religious tracts. None of the above. I picked up some dental floss for cover, shuffled to the counter shiftily and asked for the "pilule du lendemain", she got it out of the drawer and gave it to me. I tried to look suitably contrite and responsible, and paid my €10.

She put the floss and the pill in a bag, then paused for a second and put something else in there.

"Je vous ai mis un echantillon gratuit"

(I've put a free sample in for you)

I was touched by her sweet attempt to put me at ease. Lovely pharmacist! I thanked her profusely, but still with a note of sombre contrition, and left, light heartedly.

Then I looked in the bag.

Yup. Intimate wash. Because people who have contraceptive emergencies are DIRTY.

32 comments:

Halfwaythere
said...

That is unnecessarily cruel. At least in the UK when they lead you aside to give you a good talking to (ignoring protestations of 'but I did! it broke!)they leave you with an encouraging 'try to be a bit more prepared next time'.

But this is the country who provided the world with 'half a cock', so who knows what they are ever really thinking...

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! This happened to me recently in the good ol' US of A, where you have to ask for it by its bloody BRAND NAME "HI! My name is -- and I'd like to purchase 'Plan B', have a GREAT DAY!" Then you go home and feel sick for 48 hours.They don't give you a lecture, though. They just ask for your ID so they can log you as a baby killer with the CIA and take your money.

If any consolation at all, I had to buy a pregnancy test in my hodge podge French in some one horse town in the Vienne once. I felt as though I had putain Anglaise BRANDED across my forehead. And then the silly moo wldn't sell me any proper drugs in case I was pregnant. Sigh. Worst thing was I was there writing for he whole summer in a neighbouring village & I ended up driving an extra 20kn to go the hyper just so I wldn't have to go to the town again face The Looks. LLGxx

visual artist, writer and director pavlov-andreevich explores visualmechanisms as well as theatrical and literary devices in creating hisversion of "hygiene".

formally, the performance space is austere and minimal. the participants siton red benches in a balanced triangular composition, all dressed in a simpleuniform. the lighting is harsh and direct. the performers' movement islimited to their lips and forearms, which they erect as they pronounce theirlines. visually, the performance becomes a rhythmic and meditative movingpicture, where stillness and balance are interrupted by only one kind ofmonotonous movement.

pavlov-andreevich's script pursues tropes of russian formalism oncediscovered by vsevolod meyerhold in the 1930s. the premise of theperformance is that its participants, whether internationally renownedartists/actors/musicians or people with no previous acting experience,confront the text without rehearsal when the performance already begins. aplasma screen feeds the performers lines and the narrator reads sparsedescriptions of setting and action. because the performers do not know thetext by heart, they pronounce their lines with little inflections andinnuendos, stripping the text to its bare bones. pavlov-andreevich defiesthe principles of stanislavski's theatre where the actors are meant todeliver the script as their own thoughts and words infused with emotion.instead, characters of "hygiene" become disengaged reciters of a text thatlives on its own. this defamiliarization provokes a new understanding ofthe script, which becomes the main protagonist of the performance. theperformers are not actors but rather marionettes, controlled by a monotonousrhythm and put under trance by the recitation of a text they neverpracticed pronouncing.

the performance at deitch projects takes place two times with the same cast,twice during one evening. the performers' gradual familiarization with thescript essentially destroys the premises of the artwork. during the secondinstallment of "hygiene", the marionettes become actors and the scriptbecomes permeated with their interpretations and emotional responses; it isat this time that the cycle needs to be restarted.

visitor

"i've worked out a way to evacuate corpses by dumping them out in thestreet. we'll need large plastic bags, but I don't know where to get them"

grandfather

"just as I told you: the military are pulling out. they'll get out of thecity, then will set up a quarantine. no one in, no one out. the worst partis that everything has turned out to be true"

Dear Jaywalker, When I was a student i decided to make my life complicated by using a cap rather than the pill or codoms like everyone else in the world.Anyway, when i went to be fitted i was told I had to have some peculiar special springy one because of my strange physionomy. I was shown the difference - the one I needed went banana shaped when you pressed the sides together. Anyway I went to boots, they got my prescription together and away I went. When i got home i got it out - squeezed the sides together. No banana. What to do? Yes I had to go back, with the offending cap, find the pharmacist (male of course) and try and explain what was wrong with it in front of a large queue of old ladies and nubile gentlemen...and then, I didn't even get to use it as my boyfriend dumped me...So I feel your pharmacy pain!

You can't even get the morning after pill just by going to the pharmacy here. I had to go to the doctor for mine.

They always give you free smaples of something here when you pick up a prescription. My boyfriend usually gets good stuff. All I ever get is packets of tissues. Every single time. Do I look like I'm prone to runny noses or something?!

you can console yourself with the fact that at least you have had your fun before requesting your embarassing product. the girl behind the counter probably hasn't had any in a while. i've notice that the longer one goes without sex, the more one looks down their nose at those who have had it recently. sheer envy, i'm certain.

my word is "citclocu" which sounds like a portion of the female anatomy men always ignore.

I just find these pharmacies where everything is locked away mortifying. I was once in Spain when my period arrived early and I was forced to enter a pharmacy full of hundreds of moustachioed dwarf women just to get tampax. Tampax which were so dangerous they had them locked in a glass cabinet at the back of the room.

And I didn't know the Spanish for tampax, which led to some exciting signing opportunities before I spied some and did some frantic pointing instead.

Katyboo's pharmacy pantomime adventures sound much more mortifying but fortunately less protracted than my best example. I was in Italy with a friend whose ears had gone all stopped up with earwax. She wanted one of this sort of thing, if there were any to be had. My Italian is terrible, but marginally better than hers, so I was deputized to the task.

I honestly wouldn't know what to call this thing even in English ("um, a bulb thing for irrigating your ear when you have too much earwax"?), and am still far from certain that anything of the sort exists in Italy at all, so this was a real adventure. There were drawings involved, and lots of elaborate pantomime with going BOOF! to illustrate how the water would BOOF! out into your ear. In the end they offered us some ear candles.

Over share as much as you like hun. Nothing is too much for us stalwart bloggers who prefer the internets to our 'real' lives.When you get the MAP from boots, they make you sign a form!! Cant actually remember what it was..or what it said (never to have unprotected sex again perhaps? Ha! In that case I lied....) but they are quite nice about it....Anyway. Good for you. Cant help feeling that a pregnancy situation at this stage would NOT help.....

I have also had a "contraceptive emergency", but in Canada, you have to go to a walk-in clinic and deal with a doctor who gives you the requisite pills. They don't lecture you or anything like that. Except that I felt compelled to explain that honestly, I don't make a habit of this, that it just broke this time, etc, etc.

Here's my euro contaceps story. Husband touring with band in England. Wild 80's partying ensued. I was certain that my "cap" was thrown away by hotel maid. (this had happened before) I was pleasantly surprised that diaphragms could be bought over the counter in a pharmacy. (A trip to the doctor and an Rx is required in the States) Unfortunately, I had no idea what size I was. Pleasant British pharmacist helped as I eyeballed the two caps I thought were the right size. Not wanting to take any more time holding and comparing, and being a "rich" American, I took both. That's my shopping motto anyway. When in doubt take both.Two caps in hand we proceeded to remote Grecian Isle. Fecking cap would not go up. Must be the wrong size. Cranky husband. Friend borrowed scooter to drive to nearest village where condoms were sold. (Embarrassing!)Weeks later, back at home I felt the familiar discomfort of cramps. But no blood? (TMI?? sorry.) The diaphragm had NOT been discarded. It was LOST. Up my. Suffice to say my cervix was never the same.

oh my god! oh you poor thing! not bad enough suffering the general mortification in general, without her implying you dont know how to wash?! They are evil pills too - i got the worst case of PMT in the universe after taking it once... (i did, it broke...)You apend so long trying not to throw it it has qhat i aklways think must be the desired effect - it stops you wanting to have sex ever again!

Jools - oh, the horror. The friend scootering off for condoms for you sort of finished it off for me. Awful!

Juci - Vanessa also had a charitable explanation based on, um, effects of M.A.P. Maybe. I would like to think so..

emily - did you type some of that with your toes? Not PMT here. Waaaay worse. Opposite effect. Like, unbelievably frisky. having inappropriate daydreams at cartel conference. wonder if she swapped MAP for viagra. Very bad.

Erm, reminds me of when I was pregnant with child the first in Paris. I was rigid with fear at the first examination - the female doc, bless her heart was doing her best to put me at ease, but the bastard speculum wasn't going anywhere, so she asked me to er, push, gently. No joy. Then she asked me to push a leeetle bit more, I complied and promptly sprayed her with wee. The mortification continues to haunt me to this day, the child was 20 in January. Oh God. *scuttles off to fill wine glass*